


Three Times

by ce_ucumatli



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: mild drug use mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 11:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11988852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ce_ucumatli/pseuds/ce_ucumatli
Summary: After Cosima learns Delphine might be alive in Season 4, she and Sarah sit around talking.





	Three Times

They sat in Cosima’s bed with their backs against the headboard, sharing a joint in silence while the lab machinery blinked away. 

“You know,” Cosima said, “I only told her I loved her three times. In our whole weird, convoluted relationship. Three times.”

Pulling herself from her own mental bog, Sarah turned. “Yeah? Well, that’s more than some people get. At least you told her.” She handed the joint back to her sister and watched the smoke drift away. “What was the first time?”

Cosima closed her eyes and gave a half smile. “The first time was when I got her baked in the lab. After I threatened to ruin her career.”

Sarah snorted. “I’m not sure which one’s harder to imagine: Delphine getting baked, or you threatening somebody. How’d you work that into an _I love you_?”

“She told me first. I wasn’t really expecting it, especially since we’d been fighting for, like, a couple of days. Remember when you shipped Kira’s tooth to Dyad?”

“Yeah...”

“That’s what we were fighting about.” Cosima took another long drag on the joint and blew the smoke out in little puffs, trying and failing to get smoke rings. “And then, that night, out of the blue, she says she loves me. But in French, so it was _je t’aime_.” Cosima’s lips pulled in exaggerated directions as she said it. “Every time she told me, she said it in French, and each time, all three times that I told her it was in English. Because my French fucking sucks, and I didn’t want to risk, like, saying something weird or offensive by accident.”

“Right.”

“And I knew she meant it, right? Like, I didn’t question that. But I was so pissed that she’d been hiding things from me that I just couldn’t accept it. I had to push back, like - ” She took another drag before passing the joint back to Sarah. “- I knew she loved me, but it wasn’t enough.”

Sarah considered her words. “Yeah, I get that.”

“So I threatened to ruin her career if she betrayed us again.”

“Us?”

“Yeah, us. The sestras. Not including Rachel, obviously.”

“Yeah, well, she’s not a sestra, is she? She’s just a bloody proclone.”

Cosima considered that, then started giggling, shaking with mirth until she fell against Sarah and snorted. “Bloody,” she said between gasps. “She probably was bloody after you put a pencil in her eye!”

“Hey, you and Scott put the pencil there. I just pulled the trigger.” Sarah waited until most of Cosima’s giggled subsided to ask, “so what about the second time?”

“Second time?”

“The second time you told Delphine you loved her.”

“Oh, yeah.” Cosima sobered up at the thought and rubbed her hands over her hair. “I was in the hospital that time. The hospital wing at Dyad, you know, after my seizure. Before they moved me down to the lab. Just a little room. Could’ve been the same room Jennifer Fitzsimmons died in, for all I know.”

“Not the room you’re gonna die in, though.”

“Not if I can help it. Anyway, Delphine came to see me. She’d brought some of my clothes and shit from her apartment. It was getting late, and the security guard wasn’t being too subtle about trying to kick her out for the night. He was, like, tapping on the wall by the door and making these stupid little huffing noises. Anyway. Delphine got her things together to go, and I told I her I loved her. I didn’t really think about it first; I just said it.” 

“That’s the best way, though, isn’t it?” Sarah said.

“I guess.” Cosima took the stub of the joint from Sarah’s fingers and smoked the last of it. “Delphine almost cried.”

“What, when you said you loved her?”

“Yeah. She’d already kissed me goodnight and stood up to go when I said it, and she, like, dropped her purse on the bed and sat back down. The security guard was pissed.”

Sarah squinted at her. “I thought Delphine was, like, in charge of Dyad or some shit, wasn’t she? Were they gonna kick out the director?”

“She wasn’t totally in charge. Not at the time. She was interim director, reporting to Rachel in some weird way.” She dropped the remains of the joint into an ashtray and dusted her hands on her pants. “And anyway, they could still kick her out of the room if they wanted to. So they did.”

Sarah made a committal noise while Cosima stared into the empty lab ahead on the other side of the basement. Cosima remembered that night, Delphine’s eyes filling with tears as she kissed her again, her glance backwards in the doorway when she finally left, the long night awake in the hospital bed. She remembered winding herself up so much emotionally that she texted Delphine at 3 am, both hoping and fearing that it would wake her.

 

* *

 

_Please don’t let me die here alone._

She hated herself for sending it almost immediately.

Four minutes later, Delphine called, voice thick with sleep, asking, “What’s wrong, chérie, did something happen?”

“No, no, everything’s....” she almost said everything was fine, but she’d woken Delphine up in the middle of the night, and Delphine needed to be awake very early for work. Cosima let her voice crack a little. “I’m just scared,” she admitted. “And I miss you.”

She heard Delphine let out a soft breath and saw her face perfectly in her mind. Her hair would be messy, her eyes closed, her lips doing that adorable almost-pout that made Cosima lose her train of thought. “I miss you, too,” Delphine said. “I miss you terribly. It’s not the same here without you.”

“I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“No, it’s okay. I don’t mind.”

They stayed on the phone without speaking, listening to each other’s breathing and, in Cosima’s case, coughing. Eventually, Cosima heard soft snores drifting from her phone. Still, she kept the connection open, listening to her girlfriend sleeping in a different bed, until she fell asleep herself.

 

* *

 

Sarah’s movement on the bed shook Cosima back to the present. That night in the hospital wing had been half a year ago, but it seemed much, much longer. 

“What about the third time, then?” Sarah asked. “You might as well tell me all three.”

Cosima didn’t like thinking about that one. “The third time... that was right after she broke up with me. After she got back from Frankfurt and all that. We were standing outside Felix’s loft. She said she couldn’t be with me anymore because... you know, Topside and shit.”

Sarah nodded. 

“I was gonna just go back in after she told me, you know? I tried to be cool. It worked for, like, five seconds, before I cracked and blubbered out that I loved her. I thought... I don’t know. Maybe I thought it would make her change her mind. She didn’t say it back.”

Beside her, Sarah watched her face. “I remember that. That time, when she made me play Rachel so they could trick Ferdinand. I kept asking her if she’d talked to you yet, `cause I knew you missed her, and she kept changing the subject.”

“She knew she was gonna break up with me. I don’t know when she made that decision, but it must’ve been before she got back to Canada. Whatever they did in Frankfurt convinced her that....” Cosima shrugged and held up her hands. “That it was better if she weren’t dating me.”

Sarah reached over the took her hand. “All things considered, maybe it was better.”

Cosima looked down at their joined fingers, so similar but scarred in different ways. “It never felt better,” she said. “Not to me.” She saw Delphine’s face in her mind’s eye, firm and determined as she told Cosima she couldn’t be with her anymore, and again, outside of Bubbles, her facade cracking as she kissed Cosima one last time. 

“We’ll find her, Cos,” Sarah said. “Whatever happened, we’ll find her. And then, you can tell her a fourth time. As many times as you want.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've never smoked pot, so hopefully the joint-smoking works here.
> 
> Feedback appreciated as always.


End file.
